Looks like the new approach by the administration is a lot closer to what the rest of us have been calling for. We'll know the details in President Obama's speech today -- in the meantime, HuffPo reports Obama will veto anything from the Super Committee that’s all Medicare cuts and no tax hikes - not exactly reassuring, so I'd need to see the details:

President Obama on Monday will unveil a plan to tame the nation’s rocketing federal debt that will draw a sharp contrast with the Republican vision and amount more to an opening play in the fall’s debate over the economy than another attempt at finding common ground with the opposing party.

The president will propose $1.5 trillion in new taxes as part of a plan to find at least $3 trillion in budget savings over a decade, according to a person familiar with the matter. Combined with his call earlier this month for $450 billion in new stimulus, the proposal represents a more populist approach to confronting the nation’s economic travails than the compromises he advocated this summer.

Obama will propose new taxes on the wealthy and a special new tax for millionaires, according to White House officials. But he won’t call for any changes in Social Security, officials say, and may seek less-aggressive changes to Medicare and Medicaid than previously considered. In particular, people familiar with the matter say he is unlikely to call for an increase in the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

Coming as a congressional super­committee goes to work to find budget savings this fall, Obama’s position will probably delight Democrats, who have fretted for months that he is doing too little to solve the nation’s jobs crisis while being too willing to embrace major changes to Medicare and Social Security.

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I was sitting at my desk Tuesday when I felt something strange. My desk chair was rolling back and forth, and when I turned around to look out my window, I saw the wall shaking.

I live in Philadelphia. We're not used to earthquakes. We're not designed for them.

More to the point, my city has old, poorly-maintained infrastructure. In my neighborhood, every time we have a heavy rainstorm, we see sinkholes pucker up everywhere. Our local sewer system is 150 years old. Our bridges are uncomfortably close to collapse, and no one does anything other than slap the equivalent of Band-Aids on the problems.

Why? Because for 30 years, state and congressional Republicans have made it impossible to raise necessary taxes.

When the earthquake hit, I was checking the latest storm track for Hurricane Irene. All I could think of was, "Swell. Looks like a direct hit on the East Coast, and I wonder what programs the Republicans will insist we cut to pay for the clean-up."

I look at Dave's story, where we see funding was cut for earthquake sensors at nuclear power plants -- right near the epicenter of yesterday's quake -- and I feel like screaming, "What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Then I see the latest reports that indicate (surprise!) the Deepwater Horizon site is leaking again, and no one's talking about it. Seen anything on the news? Oh, and I'm not even mentioning the news that the area around the Fukushima power plants will be uninhabitable for a long, long time.

And that's not counting the numerous problems with our food and water supplies.

What do these things have in common? They're things government can, and should, take care of. Here in the U.S., we count on our federal agencies to regulate, enforce, anticipate problems - and clean up after national disasters.

We are the richest nation in the world. We can afford this.

What we can't afford is another string of wars. We can't continue to cut everything at home to pay for wars elsewhere, particularly when they're for such blatantly dishonest reasons. We need to stop. Now.

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Steve Benen writes the defense post that I've been considering for the last few days. He's asking, so where are those responsible Republican fiscal hawks who believe "smaller government is better government" when the defense budget comes up for discussions? Answer - they never really existed.

It's a reminder that when Republicans block domestic spending on areas like extended unemployment insurance, what we're seeing is a reflection of priorities -- the already-enormous Pentagon budget is important (even if it means funding programs the Defense Department doesn't want) and struggling families aren't.

It's also a reminder that Republican talk about fiscal responsibility is a shallow scam. Putting aside the fact that GOP interest in the issue is quite new -- these are, after all, the same Republican officials who added $5 trillion to the debt in just eight years -- it's also incredibly narrow. They want to reduce the deficit, but if you raise the prospect of tax increases, now that tax rates are at their lowest rates since the days of Harry Truman, they balk. They want to get spending under control, but if you even mention modest cuts to the breathtaking Pentagon budget, the GOP looks for a fainting couch.

Meanwhile, with European countries embracing austerity measures, what's on the chopping block? Their defense budgets, of course. Prominent conservative voices like to say that we should do what Greece and others in Europe are doing, and look to scale back dramatically, but they're apparently hoping we don't pay too close attention to the kind of measures getting cut.

Continuing the discussion in Bruce Bartlett's post, there's a good thread of comments making the point that cutting defense does not automatically equate to reducing national security interests. There's no question that we could cut back on acquisition projects, eliminate more bases, consolidate military logistics, medical and transportation functions, let the State Dept do nation-building and partner coalition efforts. There's no forcing mechanism right now, because Congress has no appetite suppressant. But we knew that.

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I think Krugman nails this one. The Republican deficit hawks don't want to make tough choices - they really do want the government to crash and burn:

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

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Of course, Geithner is pushing the Very Serious Idea of reforming Social Security and Medicare. Doesn't everyone?

Considering that the Greenspan commission didn't actually work - at least, not the way that Geithner says it did - it kind of leads me to wonder what he actually means.

From This Week:

TAPPER: Do you think the fact that you guys are pushing the bipartisan commission is indicative of the fact that our political system is not capable of taking on the serious challenges our nation faces?

You and I know that the money, as Willie Sutton says, said, that -- why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. The money is in entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, things that you do not touch in this budget.

The fact that you need a bipartisan commission to recommend cuts or tax increases, doesn't that indicate that our political system is incapable of making these tough decisions?

GEITHNER: Jake, I am very confident in our ability as a country to bring people together and make sure we are solving these challenges and these problems. We've done it in the past, it is completely within our capacity to do as a country.

But of course, it requires you bringing people together across the aisle to step back from politics, to try to bring practical solutions to things that are very important to our future as a country. And the president is committed to do that.

We're going to give the Republican Party the chance to share in the responsibility and the burden and the privilege of trying to fix the things that were broken in this country.

TAPPER: Republicans are afraid this is just a back door for tax increases. Are you willing to say that tax increases are off the table for this commission? Let's sit down and talk about the long-term structural problems with entitlement spending?

GEITHNER: The president's view, and this is a view shared by many Republicans, and it builds on what we've seen with effective commissions in the past, like the Greenspan commission that President Reagan established to help restore the financial footing of Social Security, is that for this to work, you've got to bring people together to step back from politics, day-to-day politics, and to bring fresh ideas to solve these kind of problems.

That's the only way to do it, we think. And we're committed to doing that. We've got to do it on a bipartisan basis, and we're deeply serious about doing this.

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Well, Glenn Beck's special "documentary" -- at least, that's what he calls it -- "The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free Or Die" aired Friday, and it was pretty much exactly what we predicted: A long promotion for Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism and its underlying thesis, to wit, that fascism is "properly understood" as "a phenomenon of the left."

In Beck's hands, of course, this mishmash of a theory gets mashed even more, so that fascism is indistinguishable from communism and socialism, and that all are essentially identified in the bundle of the progressive movement, which is Beck's ultimate target.

On Friday, Beck worried that "the academic bloc" of the progressive movement would be arraying its forces to attack him for this piece of work (and it is a real piece of work). Probably, most of them will dismiss it as just another piece of lunacy from the nation's fearmonger in chief.

But it's obvious that, despite the cold reality that Goldberg's thesis is profoundly dishonest and the most odious kind of historical fraud, right-wingers like Beck not only believe it but have embarked on avidly promoting it -- especially among the Tea Party set, where the signs calling Obama a fascist are almost as common as those decrying his tax increases.

As I mentioned Friday, I began some months ago organizing some of the more authoritative historical experts -- historians and political scientists -- in an effort to finally produce a serious response from academics to Goldberg's traduced version of history.

Today, at History News Network, you can read the initial essays.

In addition to my introduction, there are four essays:

-- Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, leads off the essays with "The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism."

-- Roger Griffin, professor of political science at Oxford Brookes and the author of The Nature of Fascism, has a piece titled "An Academic Book - Not!"

-- Matthew Feldman, professor of history at University of Northampton, and a co-editor of several academic texts on fascism, offers his assessment on why refuting Goldberg still matters: "Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions".

-- Chip Berlet, senior researcher at Political Research Associates and the co-author (with Matthew Lyons) of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, has penned a history of Goldberg's arguments, "The Roots of Liberal Fascism: The Book."

For those who watched Beck's "special," the following excerpt from Paxton's piece alone may suffice:

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If Reid doesn't get this done, he won't be Majority Leader for long:

Talk about using budget reconciliation to pass healthcare reform in the Senate has faded from public view, but Democratic leaders continue to hang the threat over centrists in private.

FYI: They're not "centrists" - they're corporate conservatives.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) discussed reconciliation with wavering centrists before an important procedural vote to begin debate on healthcare reform.

On Saturday, Nov. 21, three centrists, Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), voted to commence debate, despite heavy pressure from Republicans and conservative groups to oppose it.

Nelson wrote in an op-ed last week that he voted for the motion to avoid the prospect of Reid bringing healthcare legislation to the floor under budget reconciliation, a process with special procedural protections originally intended for legislation to reduce the deficit, such as tax increases or spending cuts.

[...] Under reconciliation, healthcare legislation could pass with a simple majority after a strictly limited floor debate. But lawmakers would have to carve up the bill to eliminate provisions that do not clearly raise revenue or cut spending and therefore would be subject to parliamentary objections. Reid has said that he could pass a government-run health insurance program, known as the public option, under reconciliation.

I can draw only one of two conclusions: Either the Obama administration's economic advisers and their Congressional enablers are as dumb as a box of hammers and completely oblivious to the history of the first Great Depression, or they do know and are gambling with the nation's economy anyway - because they're afraid the Republicans might draw blood in the next election cycle:

WASHINGTON — Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats, the White House and Congressional leaders are weighing options for narrowing the gap, including a bipartisan commission that could force tax increases and spending cuts.

But even the idea of a panel to bridge the partisan divide has run into partisan objections. Many Democrats, including in the White House, are loath to cede such far-reaching decisions to a commission and doubt Republicans’ willingness to compromise. And most Republicans remain adamantly opposed to tax increases, leaving the prospects for any bipartisan approach limited at best.

The proponents, however, are pressing for a Senate vote this month. “If we have the same process and the same people, we are going to get the same results,” said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, who recently met with Mr. Obama to discuss the idea. “The Democratic Party wants to spend more than we can afford, the Republican Party tends to want to cut taxes more than we can afford. So we are stuck.”

And of course, the grandstanding Mr. Bayh is the man who loves to agree with the Republicans.

Concerns about the deficit are building even as the White House and Congress continue to add to it with tax cuts and spending to stimulate a still-fragile economy. Yet those one-time costs do not trouble most economists and market analysts.

The main driver of long-term deficits is the chasm between the benefit programs Medicare and Medicaid, which are growing faster than the economy, and federal tax collections, which are at one of their lowest levels in many decades relative to the size of the economy.

Mr. Obama’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, now at work on the president’s next budget, due in February for the 2011 fiscal year, declined to comment about a bipartisan commission and instead promised that the coming budget would propose additional ways to reduce the deficit beyond next year, when the economy is fully recovered.

Paul Krugman referred us to this just the other day:

Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

A lot of politicians and political operatives in DC are very impressed by polling that shows people concerned about the budget deficit. I think it would be really politically insane for people to take that too literally. If congress makes the deficit even bigger in a way that helps spur recovery, then come election day people will notice the recovery and be happy. If, by contrast, the labor market is still a disaster then people will be pissed off. It’s true that they might say they’re pissed off at the deficit, but the underlying source of anger is the objective bad conditions.

But the political argument against focusing on the deficit is even stronger than he realizes — because there are very good odds that even if Obama exhibited iron fiscal discipline, voters wouldn’t notice. There’s a remarkable, depressing paper by Achen and Bartels that includes an analysis of voter views of the deficit in 1996 — by which time the huge deficit that Bill Clinton inherited had been drastically reduced.

Here’s what voters thought they knew... Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward budget balance in history, a majority of Republicans, and a plurality of all voters, believed that deficits had increased.

Not to put too fine a point on it: if Obama succeeded in reducing the deficit, would Fox News or the Washington Times report it?

The truth is that the truth about budgets plays almost no role in real politics. Right now, Meg Whitman is campaigning for Governor of California on the claim that state spending has exploded over the last decade — when the fact is that it has fallen drastically in real per capita terms. Will she pay a price for this? Probably not.

So if I were a politician, I’d focus on providing real improvements in peoples’ lives, rather than seeking deficit reductions the public won’t even hear about.

Not to mention that in 1937, when FDR, under pressure from the Blue Dogs of his time, cut taxes and spending, it deepened and prolonged the Depression by driving unemployment back into double digits - and led to a major defeat in the 1938 mid-terms for the Democrats.

KXMC.com (Minot, ND):

The Bush administration has sent signals since last month's elections that the president is prepared to accept some tax increases on upper-income families, worrying congressional Republicans and fiscal conservative watchdogs who say he will compromise with Democrats to win a legacy accomplishment...

The watchdog groups have been demanding that the president repeat his earlier pledges not to raise taxes in order to reform Social Security. But the White House has refused, with officials saying everything is on the table, including tax increases....

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I'm trying to think if I've ever read a story where Republican senators are decrying a piece of their legislation as having to move "too far to the right" because they need to cater to the right-wing votes in their caucus. You can't either, right? It's only the Democrats who not only feel compelled to screw their base, they feel perfectly comfortable whining about it as if it's reasonable:

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), facing reelection next year, spoke up to oppose a plan being drafted by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad that would impose a new surtax on millionaires of about three percent on top of the higher tax rates they would face when the George W. Bush tax cuts expire next year, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

Nelson later explained through a spokesman that he was opposed to “double taxation,” even on the wealthy.

Another centrist on the budget committee, Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), has also opposed the idea.

Several centrist Democrats (Editor's note: They mean "right wing Blue Dogs") have been voicing concern in private sessions that Conrad’s draft may be shifting too far to the left in order to placate liberals on the committee whose votes are needed to move the legislation, according to aides.

Republicans have been rallying around a House spending plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), even as they’ve been sending mixed signals in recent days over a key provision calling for a deep overhaul of Medicare.

The Democratic-run Senate, meantime, has been unable — or unwilling — to lay out its alternative agenda.